Gov. Ron DeSantis has been aggressive in pushing school choice options in Florida.
If elected President, he says he would bring the same options to the rest of the country.
“I think you have to do it nationally even though I think ideally it would be done at the state or local level because places like Chicago are never going to give these kids opportunities,” DeSantis said Friday.
“It’s controlled by the teacher union. They are not going to liberate. These are poor kids, and they’re basically trapped in schools that are failing (such as in) Baltimore (and) Philadelphia. So, we’ll be able to come in with scholarships to liberate these kids and give them opportunity, and it will be in other parts of the country, too.”
DeSantis also claimed that if Florida’s charter schools were a “state,” they’d be in the “top five” nationally for performance.
2023 saw an expansion of the state’s school choice program, with new categories of students eligible to receive a voucher worth $8,000 per student to go to any private school. The cost to the state was estimated at the time to be at least $642 million.
The voucher program had been limited to families making 400% or less than the Federal Poverty Level (FPL), which is about $111,000 a year for a family of four. The state has been able to meet the demand from that group, although there is a waitlist for children with special needs to get funded.
New additions include children currently enrolled in public school whose parents earn more than 400% of the federal poverty level, children presently attending private school whose families make too much for the current scholarship, called the Family Empowerment Scholarship, and even homeschooled students who agree to a certain level of state oversight.
It’s uncertain if the so-called “universal school choice” model would include all income groups nationally if DeSantis were President and got that through Congress.
“K through 12. We are going to be able to do, I believe, universal school choice nationally. I think we’re going to be able to do it. We’re working on how,” DeSantis said in Nevada last month. “At least we’ll be able to bring school choice to lower and working-class people.”
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Anne Geggis contributed reporting.
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